Suburbs

Suburbs

“Every true suburb is the outcome of two opposing forces, an attraction toward the opportunities of the great city and a simultaneous repulsion against urban life” (Fishman 1987, p. 26). Though suburbs are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as any territory within a metropolitan area yet outside of the central city, the formation of suburbs is not simply based on geographic location. Suburbs are largely the product of people’s desire for separation based on social factors. These factors vary between instances of suburb formation, but frequently include separation of class, religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial groups. The traditional pattern of white populations and wealth found in U.S. suburbs is not mirrored internationally, although the common feature of suburbs around the world is separation of populations. For instance, the suburbs of Mumbai, India, house many of the city’s poor, while in Paris the suburbs are ethnically stratified, with suburban ethnic minority populations suffering from high rates of unemployment and other forms of discrimination.

The early suburbs of London, as well as several in the United States, were built around the separation of different economic classes. During the eighteenth century, wealthy business owners in London began to use landholdings around Westminster as a way to avoid the lower classes within urban areas. A century later, the same happened in the United States around the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Suburbs such as these, based on class separation, can best be described as bourgeois enclaves. Here the wealthy could establish communities that reflected their own values and beliefs (Fishman 1987).

The formation of middle-class suburbs in the United States beginning in the early twentieth century and expanding rapidly after World War II (1939–1945) is the result of a number of factors. A strong economy at the beginning of the century made the suburban lifestyle more accessible to many Americans. The development of lower-cost homogenized housing, such as the Sears Catalog home, made purchasing a house a realistic prospect for the middle class. In the 1920s, U.S. suburban growth surpassed urban growth for the first time (Weeks 1981). Economic factors during the Great Depression caused the growth of suburbs to decline drastically. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, suburban growth rates resurged and reached their highest levels (Rothblatt and Garr 1986). This resurgence is frequently attributed to strong economic growth and social programs like the GI Bill that provided opportunities to service members after the war.

In 1947 construction began on Levittown on Long Island, New York, a project considered the start of the middle-class suburban revolution in America. The rapid expansion of the freeway system during the early 1950s made possible the development of many similar communities, as is evident in the expansion of freeways and homes in the Los Angeles area (Fishman 1987; Weeks 1981). Levittown has since become a term used to describe various social problems accompanying the formation of suburbs, including white flight, cultural wasteland, and separate spheres of family and economic life (Keller 1998).

Home ownership, achieved through the development of suburbs, is the most important factor of wealth accumulation in American society. While economic factors played a significant role in the formation of suburbs, they do not explain why middle-class Americans felt the need to escape urban areas that had previously been acceptable to them. In fact, economic factors have helped constrain suburban growth that has been driven by other factors, such as race. Prior to the twentieth century, there had been a relatively small African American population in U.S. cities. However, the migration of African Americans from rural areas in the early twentieth century brought significant white resistance and a push for racially segregated housing areas (Massey and Denton 1998). White flight, the mass migration of whites out of the cities, was hindered by economic factors during the Great Depression. Following World War II, however, the movement of whites to the peripheral areas around cities, coupled with social and institutional policies of racially restrictive housing, resulted in high degrees of racial segregation. White flight became a major factor in school desegregation policy; in the mid-1970s a debate arose over whether busing for the purpose of school desegregation would lead to increases in white flight.

School desegregation has had numerous effects on the formation and structure of America’s suburbs. In the midst of the period of white flight, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) led to the integration of many schools in neighborhoods that had previously been white enclaves. A number of measures were taken by white communities and conservative local and state governments to resist school integration. School busing during the 1960s and 1970s became a strongly debated issue, and residents of suburbs found they could maintain racial segregation of schools more effectively than had been possible in inner-city areas. Due to the effectiveness of suburbs as residential enclaves, white residents could gerrymander school districts in order to halt integration (James 1989). By the late 1970s, school busing had become a less pressing issue (Woodard 1998). While affirmative action policies remained in effect, opposition to such policies rose during the 1980s with the idea that the United States had transcended racial issues. As a result, there has been an increase in school segregation in suburban areas since 1989 (Reardon et al. 2000). In addition, policies still in place to aid school integration are being challenged throughout the country, despite the fact that public schools remain heavily segregated. In 2006 the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases regarding school integration policies that some parents considered discriminatory. Cases from Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, reviewed whether public schools can take race into consideration in campus assignments in order to achieve racial integration. In a 5–4 decision the Court declared that schools attempting to achieve or maintain racial integration cannot do so by measures that take explicit account of the students’ race (Greenhouse 2007).

Despite the passage in 1968 of the Fair Housing Act, little progress has been made toward racial integration of suburbs (Orser 1998). The Fair Housing Act prohibited owners, real-estate agents, and renters from denying access to housing on the basis of race. The act also outlawed lying about the availability of a dwelling, and prevented blockbusting (telling white residents that minorities are moving into a neighborhood in an effort to convince them to sell) (Sidney 2003). As of 1990, only 20 percent of Americans lived in desegregated neighborhoods (Darden 1998). Housing segregation between whites and Hispanics, as well as between whites and Asians, has risen since 1980. However, studies have shown that suburbanization is tied to socioeconomic status among Hispanics and Asians, but suburbs have remained mostly closed to blacks whatever their socioeconomic status (Darden 1998). Housing discrimination has also contributed to higher levels of poverty, a lower average income, and lower life chances for those trapped in declining inner-city neighborhoods.

One result of the formation of suburbs was that people who were left behind in urban neighborhoods were forced to deal with urban decay brought about by the flight of millions out of the cities. Buildings were left empty, and businesses were forced to close and move to more profitable areas. Resources previously available within cities were shifted to peripheral areas as suburbs grew. The 1949 Housing Act was designed to facilitate redevelopment in areas that had been affected by urban decay; this process came to be known as urban renewal . The act sparked a debate over how to handle such renewal. Federal subsides were given to private developers in order to generate new business within urban areas. But development was centered heavily around the interests of those in suburban areas, and little attention was paid to the needs of those living within urban areas. In addition, most urban development took place in residential areas, forcing many out of their homes. Eventually, a compromise was reached, and developers were required to find alternative housing for those displaced by urban renewal (Hays 1995). Urban-renewal plans have consistently favored the interests of the suburbs. As far back as 1766 an urban-renewal plan for London was designed around the needs of business owners with little regard for workers and lower-class citizens (Fishman 1987). Today, urban renewal still often functions in the interests of suburban residents over the poor and minorities who remain in inner cities.

From 1970 to 1990, the number of high-poverty metropolitan areas doubled; these areas are more likely to be home to traditionally disadvantaged minorities (Sidney 2003). American suburbs formed out of a desire for racial segregation. In the twenty-first century, continuing housing discrimination in America’s suburbs leads to a continuation of racial segregation with increases in economic stratification.

suburb

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

suburb, a community in an outlying section of a city or, more commonly, a nearby, politically separate municipality with social and economic ties to the central city. In the 20th cent., particularly in the United States, population growth in urban areas has spilled increasingly outside the city limits and concentrated there, resulting in large metropolitan areas where the populations of the suburbs taken together exceed that of the central city.

History of Suburbs

Suburbs have existed in various forms since antiquity, when cities typically were walled and the villages outside them were inferior in size and status. However, the modern notion of the quiet, unspoiled outskirts as a retreat for the wealthy urbanite is in evidence as early as the 6th cent. BC in Babylon. In ancient Greece, the economic interdependence between the city and the agricultural communities surrounding it was given political definition by the formation of the city-state. Cicero in the 1st cent. BC refers to suburbani, large country estates just outside Rome.

Throughout Europe, the distinction between the city and outlying districts tended to remain sharp through the Middle Ages and Renaissance; to accommodate a large influx of newcomers, city walls were expanded, or, as with London, densely populated towns adjacent to the overcrowded city were gradually annexed to it. Generally considered a less desirable location, the urban periphery was inhabited largely by the poor.

In England, the rich who owned weekend villas outside London gradually transferred their main residences there, and the middle class soon followed. By the middle of the 19th cent., the distribution of population in metropolitan London and Manchester confirmed that popular preference for suburban living had become marked. Migration from the central city to the suburbs was encouraged by a succession of technological advances in transportation throughout the 19th and well into the 20th cent. The steamboat ferry, horse-drawn stagecoaches and railways, and the electric streetcar or trolley, all enabled urban dwellers to commute longer distances than had previously been practical.

Suburbs in Twentieth-Century America and Beyond

The mass production of the automobile gave new impetus to suburbanization in the early decades of the 20th cent., allowing commuters to live yet further from their place of employment. The automobile virtually eliminated restrictions on travel, and the subsequent demise of much public transportation left millions dependent on the automobile. State and local governments responded with massive road-building projects, and the federal government with a major expansion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s.

Congestion in the central city and a consequent deterioration of living conditions there provided additional incentive for people to move to the suburbs. In some cases, such migration diminished the city's tax base to the point that it could not afford to provide adequate services, inciting further suburban flight of business as well as population; some older U.S. cities, such as Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, have been especially affected by this trend, which became apparent soon after World War II.

The rise of modern suburbia has also been encouraged by the appeal of the suburban lifestyle, often characterized by an image of urbane society living graciously in an idyllic setting, where neighborhoods of single-family houses on large, private lots are combined with convenient proximity to the city's business and employment opportunities and cultural attractions. However, the traditional attractions of the central city are increasingly themselves located in the suburban ring. Most suburban communities in the United States grew spontaneously, although a few were carefully preplanned by architects and real-estate developers. These include, at the beginning of the 20th cent., Shaker Heights, a wealthy suburb of Cleveland, and, in the 1940s and 50s, Levittown, N.Y., a middle-class suburb of New York City, which was the model for two more Levittowns near Philadelphia.

Most conspicuously shaped by suburban sprawl are the metropolitan areas of the Sun Belt that have boomed since World War II. The Los Angeles area, often held up as an exemplar of the suburban metropolis, spans c.34,000 sq mi (c.88,000 sq km). With a population of more than 14.5 million, although ranking second in the nation, it has a relatively low population density of about 430 people per square mile, less than one fifth that of metropolitan New York. Many newer U.S. metropolises are distinctly suburban in character even within the corporate limits of the central city.

The largest suburbs in the United States have the population of a middle-sized city; Mesa, Ariz. (1990 pop. 288,091), a suburb of Phoenix, is more populous than Newark, N.J. (1990 pop. 275,221). Many suburbs remain racially as well as economically exclusive; efforts at integration often result in racially segregated neighborhoods within the larger suburban municipality. The shift of population out of the central city has had the effect of attracting industry and commerce to the suburbs. The rise of suburban industrial parks (areas zoned primarily for office space) and shopping centers has led to the further decline of the central city. Suburbs have been particularly successful in attracting newer, often high-technology, industries.

Since 1980, huge new concentrations of economic activities have developed in the most accessible suburban locations. These suburban downtowns in the 1990s reached a scale and diversity reminiscent of the central city downtown. Some notable examples are Tysons Corner, Va., near Washington, D.C., Stamford, Conn., and Costa Mesa, Calif. In densely populated regions, the suburban expanses of large urban areas may coalesce, creating a megalopolis. The Atlantic seaboard from Washington, D.C., north to Boston includes the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York and is sometimes considered a single economic and social unit; in recent decades, the Pacific coast from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay area has witnessed a similar development, as have heavily populated regions in England, Germany, and Japan. By 1990 the majority of U.S. citizens lived in suburbs, and during the next decade that majority increased.

Suburban growth slowed and urban growth increased somewhat in the 1990s, as density in the first tier of suburbs neared and sometimes reached urban levels. During this period a significant difference became apparent in suburban development in the West and the South. In the West, where land and resources precluded growth, suburbs became increasingly dense. Population increases were particularly high around Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland. In the South, with fewer natural barriers to growth, the density of first-tier suburbs was lower, suburban growth spread further afield, the creation of suburbs far from cities was more prevalent, and converging bands of suburbs began to rival the great metropolitan corridors of the Northeast and industrial Midwest. Suburban development in the Northeast and Midwest during this period fell somewhere between these extremes.

For years many critics, themselves largely urban, have criticized suburbs as cultural deserts where neighbors are strangers, women are virtually imprisoned, and environmental concerns are scorned. While many concerns relating to suburbia continue, by the beginning of the 21st cent. many stereotypical views were fading with the proliferation of suburban colleges and museums, the increase of local employment opportunities, the enrichment of surburban women's lives, and the realization by academics that in today's suburbia there is often a positive sense of community as well as a complex social structure.

Everyday Life: Suburbs

Everyday Life: Suburbs

Growth of Suburbs. During the first part of the nineteenth century Americans thought of a suburban home as an isolated country house to which a wealthy family retired. As railroads began to extend farther from cities, as the cable car was put into use in the 1870s, and as the electric streetcar was developed in the 1880s, however, more and more city dwellers were able to move outside the city limits to more rural areas. Such changes permanently refashioned the image of suburbia in the United States as more and more suburbs grew up along rail lines. These “streetcar” or “railroad suburbs” placed suburban living within the reach of middle-class Americans. Suburbs fulfilled the desire of many late-nineteenth-century Americans for the beauty and serenity of the country without the isolation of truly rural areas. Convenient and affordable, suburbs offered many a compelling reason to commute.

City Services for the Suburbs. Throughout the 1880s many early suburbs tried to provide residents urban-style amenities—including parks, schools, and cultural associations—and services such as running water and sewer connections. These additions took time and money. Community associations and real-estate developers met some of these needs, but residents also turned to local governments. By the 1890s the best suburban communities advertised their paved streets, schools, good transportation, and other services formerly available only in cities. As suburbs grew, rural life also changed. In many regions agricultural villages became suburbs.

Industrial Suburbs. By the turn of the century factory owners took advantage of the services suburban homeowners had obtained from their local governments.

Drawn away from urban areas by less expensive lands, industrialists build large suburban factories supported by good roads, mass transportation, sewerage, and water services. The first to take advantage of business opportunities in the suburbs was George Pullman, who built his Pullman car works and the model town Pullman in a southern suburb of Chicago in 1882. Such an arrangement, where workers lived in a single-industry suburb, provided them access to good services but left them vulnerable to the dictates of their employer and landlord.

Suburbia

Suburbia.1. Residential areas the style of which evolved from C19 ideals associated with the Arts-and-Crafts and Aesthetic Movements, and with the Domestic Revival and Garden Suburb (e.g. Bedford Park, Chiswick, London (from 1877) and Hampstead Garden Suburb, London (from 1906) ), though very often as a travesty, based more on commerce than aesthetics. These low-rise developments on the fringes of towns were supposed to be attempts to combine rural and urban advantages, but those benefits were often so diluted they became meaningless. The suburb, with its detached and semi-detached houses set in individual gardens, offered a style of living to which many aspired, and became ubiquitous first through the development of railways and tramways, and then through the widespread use of the private motor car. Suburbia generally lacked shops, public-houses, etc., which to some was a blessing. Suburbia must not be confused with satellite towns or Garden Cities.

2. Pejorative term associated with philistinism, conformity, and dullness, and used by Modernists to promote high-rise urban developments: despite all the blandishments, however, the demand for suburban houses (with gardens ever smaller, spaces between buildings ever narrower, and architectural content wholly evaporated) seems insatiable, despite ever-growing problems of pollution caused by car ownership and over-stretched infrastructures.

Suburbs, Rise of

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SUBURBS, RISE OF

The growth of U.S. cities in the nineteenth century was integrally linked with expanding industrialization and economic development. This process of urbanization led to the formation of a "classic" pattern for U.S. cities by the 1930s. Commercial centers that included banking districts and retail establishments were located in downtown areas. Enclaves of working-class neighborhoods were often distinguished by a predominance of ethnic or minority populations circling the downtown. There were industrial and manufacturing pockets, and a growing white middle class concentrated in residential developments toward the ever-expanding city boundaries. Bus and trolley lines radiated outward from the city center to provide a transportation network. The city was a socioeconomic mosaic.

Immediately following World War II (1939–1945), urbanization quickly transitioned into suburbanization. Suburbs are largely independent communities located in close proximity to large central cities. Many suburbs have their own local governments with mayors or city managers and police departments; county governments govern others. Federal investment in economic development immediately following the war included low-cost mortgages for veterans and highway construction programs. Reorganization of American life resulted. The average white middle class family moved to newly created communities on less expensive land outside the city boundaries. Suburbs offered yards, lower density single-family housing, less noise and air pollution, and relief from declining city neighborhoods with their escalating social ills. Millions of farmland acres were converted into bedroom communities. The exodus left cities with declining property values, significant loss of tax revenue, and diminished political and social importance.

Just as urban areas were experiencing a new wave of Southern African Americans migrating to cities in search of employment, white taxpayers, jobs, and capital were migrating in mass to the suburbs, leaving the cramped ghettos and industrial areas behind. Suburbs replaced cities as the place of upward class mobility and economic prosperity. In contrast to urban social mosaics of the early twentieth century city, suburbanites most valued racial, religious, and social class homogeneity. The African American middle class and other minorities ran into social barriers in this resettlement movement, spawned by racism.

By the late twentieth century the United States had fully transitioned from the urbanization of a century earlier to a suburbanized nation. By the 1960s urban factories, office complexes, and shopping centers had followed the population. Telecommunications developments in the 1980s further stimulated suburban growth. Businesses enjoyed more flexibility, locating in desirable settings as suburban business complexes increasingly linked to international economic markets. Suburbs developed their own economic bases independent of the earlier central-city business districts. Suburban "downtowns," known as edge cities, developed on the fringes of metropolitan areas by the mid-1980s. New regional shopping malls replaced city center retail areas and neighborhood shopping centers. By the mid-1980s more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities.

With the original inner cities in continuing socioeconomic crisis, efforts by cities to annex suburbs were normally resisted by suburban residents wishing to maintain their governmental independence. Planners also explored options of consolidating regional metropolitan tax bases and redistributing suburban revenues. Regional governments advocated "fair share" policies in proposing to locate industrial areas and low-income housing in suburban areas, rather than concentrating them in inner cities.

Suburban sprawl became a key issue with the proliferation and growth of suburbs. New suburbs ringed earlier ones. The rise of suburbia lead to the formation of metropolitan areas with the central city at their core. By the late 1980s about 75 percent of the U.S. population lived in metropolitan areas. Planners predicted the coming of the megalopolis representing the consolidation of multiple metropolitan areas spatially merging together.

As sprawl continued in the 1990s, the inner suburbs faced the same socioeconomic problems as the cities, including declining property values. In an endless cycle, lower values prompted higher property taxes, which forced more movement out to newer suburbs. With suburban residents frustrated over traffic congestion and sprawling commercial development, the growth of suburban populations began to slow in the 1980s. Rising gasoline prices and urban renewal attracted some back to the city. Urbanization of the suburbs was occurring, and urban renewal was becoming suburban renewal. Ever-expanding suburbs faced the same issues encountered earlier by cities. Revenue to provide water, sewer lines, fire protection, road maintenance, police, and new schools for the fast growing suburbs became issues as the cost of government services proved to be higher for low-density tract development.

Through the later decades of the twentieth century, areas of land development increased substantially faster than population growth. Regional governments in some areas adopted urban growth boundaries in an attempt to control the rapid loss of surrounding rural lands. Many attributed metropolitan air pollution problems to urban sprawl, low density housing patterns, and greater dependency on automobiles. The number of automobiles had grown several times faster during this time period than had the actual population. In total, the rise of suburbs in the late twentieth century was one of the more profound socioeconomic transformations in U.S. history.